He stared blankly at her as she passed through the open gateway, holding her torn dress and chatting with Harlan; while against Dan’s legs the vehement Henry was battering himself and shrieking, “Look at me, papa! My goodnuss! Can’t you look at me!”
Dan consented, and when Martha and Harlan entered the Shelbys’ gate, beyond, they saw that the acrobat, still piercingly vociferous, had collected the attention of all of his audience but one. His mother still stood near the stone front steps, laughing, not looking at him; but his grandparents and his father were applauding him. He was insatiable, however; keeping them in the hot sun while he performed other athletic feats. “You shan’t go in the house, gran’ma!” he screamed. “I’m goin’ to hop on one leg all across the yard. You got to watch me. You watch me, gran’ma!”
Mrs. Oliphant obediently returned, and the new entertainment began.
“Isn’t it awful?” Harlan groaned. “Isn’t it dismaying to think what children are coming to nowadays? I’d hoped you’d let me sit on the veranda a little while with you, Martha; but I can’t ask you to stay out in an air made hideous by all this squawking and squealing.”
“Then you might come in with me,” she laughed. “Our walls are pretty thick.”
The walls of the big old house were as she said, but open windows brought the shrill, incessant “Watch me!” indoors, and the annoyed Harlan complained further of his nephew. “It makes one respect the Chinese,” he said. “They at least pay some attention to ancestors. Only certain tribes biologically very low worship children, I understand; but that seems to be our most prevalent American habit to-day. We’re deliberately making this the age of the abject worship of children — and I wish my grandmother could have lived to give her opinion of it!”
“What do you think she’d say, Harlan?”
“Isn’t hard to guess! She’d have said we’re heading the children straight for perdition. In fact, she thought that about our own generation; she thought father and mother were heading Dan and me that way; yet we were under heavy discipline compared to the way this terrible little Henry’s being brought up. Lena’s family were severe with her, I understand, and she doesn’t believe in discipline. As for Dan, he’s always been just the child’s slave.”
Martha looked compassionate. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I suppose he had to have something he could worship.”
“Well, he’s got Ornaby Addition,” Harlan suggested dryly.
“No. He had to have something besides. I think he’d have worshipped his wife, if she had ever let him, but I suppose she — —”
“No,” Harlan said, breaking the indefinite pause into which Martha had absently strayed. “But she’s always capable of being jealous.” And he looked at Martha from the side of his eye.
“Jealous of me?”
“You’ve certainly been made well enough aware of it from the very day he brought her home, Martha.”
“Oh, yes,” she assented cheerfully. “She’s never doubted that I’ve always cared for Dan, but she knows that he wasn’t in love with me. She must have always been sure of that, because — well, here I was — he had only to step over next door and ask me, but he asked her, instead. And yet, as you say, she disliked me from the start. She certainly saw I wasn’t the sort to take him away from her, even if I’d thought I could — and I knew I couldn’t. Yet it’s true she was jealous. Do you know what I think really made her so, Harlan? I think almost the principal reason was because I’m so tall.”
“What?”
“Yes, I do believe it,” Martha insisted. “Someone told me she used to be called ‘French doll’ in New York, and was very sensitive about it. She wanted to be thought a temperamental and romantic opera heroine, and would never stand near a tall woman because she was afraid of being made to look more like a French doll. I think she couldn’t endure the thought of her husband’s having a woman friend as big as I am.”
“No doubt she’s never wanted to be near you herself,” Harlan said. “But I think her feeling isn’t quite so much on the physical plane as that.”
“Oh, yes, it was. A man mightn’t understand it, but — —”
“A man might, though,” he interrupted. “Lena’s always been afraid that you’re just what she’d call the type of big Western woman Dan ought to have married in order to be happy.”
“What?” Martha cried, but her colour deepened, and there was agitation in her voice, though she laughed. “Why, what nonsense!”
“Is it?” Harlan said, and now agitation became evident in his own voice, though he controlled it manfully. “It’s what I’ve always been afraid of, myself.”
“No, no!” she cried, her colour still deepening. “That’s just nonsense!”
“Is it?” he repeated grimly. “My grandmother Savage didn’t think so. She cut Dan off with a shilling because she hoped Lena would leave him and give him a chance to marry you — eventually!”
“Harlan Oliphant! What on earth are you talking about?”
“I think you understand me,” he said. “Grandmother was a shrewd old lady, and as good a judge of character as one often sees; but sometimes she overshot the mark, as most of us do, no doubt, when we think we understand other people so thoroughly that we can manipulate their destinies. She thought a good deal that was true about Lena; but she despised her too much, and made the mistake of thinking her purely mercenary. That’s why I was the residuary legatee, Martha.”
“Of all the nonsense!” she protested, and continued to protest. She’d never heard anything so far-fetched in all her life, she declared — people didn’t put such Machiavellian subtleties into their wills; and Harlan was a creative romanticist instead of the critic she’d always believed him to be. But his romancing wasn’t successful; it was too incredible.
He listened, skeptically marking the difference between the vehemence of the words she used and the lack of conviction in the voice that uttered them. “Never mind, Martha,” he said at last. “I see you believe it and agree with me.”
“I don’t,” she still protested; but her tone was now so feeble that it only proved her determined never to make the open admission of what she denied. “It would be too tragic.”
“Why?”
“To think of that poor old woman — —”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I’m afraid it must irritate her now if she knows.”
“To think of her — —” Martha said. “Poor thing! I mean it would be too tragic to think of her hoping and planning such — such preposterousness!”
At this Harlan looked at her so sharply, so gravely, that he seemed to ask much more than appeared upon the surface of his question: “But would it be preposterous? Suppose Lena and Dan should — —”
“Separate?” she said, as he stopped at the word. “They never will.”
“But I asked you, if they should?”
Martha shook her head, smiling faintly; and she looked away from him — far away, it seemed — as she spoke. “People don’t stay ardently in love forever, Harlan. I don’t suppose anybody stays in love with anybody — forever. I think I used to believe I’d always be in love with Dan, and in a way that was true — whatever is left in me of the girl I used to be will always be in love with the boy he used to be. But I don’t know where that boy is any more. Do you understand?”
Harlan looked melancholy, as he nodded. “I suppose so.”
“I mean I’m true to my memory of him, perhaps. I’m afraid I don’t know just what I do mean.”
“I’m afraid I do, though,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s only that you’re hurt with him because Lena frightened him into keeping from even stepping over here for a minute to say, ‘Welcome home.’”
“No; it didn’t hurt — not exactly,” she returned. “But he does seem changed.” She frowned. “Do you think he’s lost something, Harlan? Is it something — something fine about him — that’s lost? It seems to me — it seems to me there must be. How could anybody expect a man to go through such a str
uggle for success as the one he’s been through and not bear the marks of it? Or maybe is it only his youthfulness he’s lost?”
“I don’t see anything missing,” Harlan replied. “He’s certainly not lost his optimistic oratory; he can still out-talk any man in town on the subject of Our Glorious Future. In fact, I think he’s even more that way than he used to be. Years ago he may have shown a few very faint traces of having been through a university, but you could sandpaper him to powder now and not find them: I don’t believe he could translate the first sentence of Cæsar, or ‘Arma, virumque cano!’ The only things he ever talks about are his business and his boy and local politics. I think that’s all he can talk about.”
“Whereas,” Martha said, with a flash of the old championing, “the learned Mr. Harlan Oliphant has only to open his mouth in order to destroy a lonely woman’s whole joy in the Italian Renaissance.”
He lifted his hands, protesting, then dropped them in despair. “So I’ve lost it already!” he said. “And lost it in the old, old way!”
“Lost what?”
“Hope,” he explained. “You see I’m years and years older than Freddie Oliphant, and he was complaining to me the other day; — he’s now considered so much ‘one of the older men’ that some of the pretty young things one sees at the Country Club were leaving him out of their festivities. You see where that puts me. So I hoped that when you came home — —”
“Yes?”
“Well, I hoped that maybe you and I shouldn’t quarrel any more, and — —”
“Quarrel? No; we mustn’t, indeed!” she said. “What else is there left for left-overs to do but to make the best of each other?”
“Nothing else, I’m afraid.”
“And I’d hoped,” he went on a little nervously;— “I’d hoped maybe you’d let me see you a good deal — that you’d let me take you places and — —”
“Good gracious!” Martha cried; and she laughed and blushed. “Haven’t you just taken me to church? Aren’t you already taking me places, Harlan?”
Chapter XXII
MARTHA HAD SAID that Dan’s remaining away “didn’t hurt — not exactly”; and by this she meant to give Harlan the impression that she was less than hurt; but such a denial, thus qualified, means in truth more than hurt. She was a “big Western woman,” but she could be sensitive, and had her resentments and her smallnesses. Perhaps she was not quite genuinely sorry to believe that the old friend who neglected to bid her welcome home had begun to look almost middle-aged and seemed to have lost something fine that he had possessed in his youth. There were characteristic possessions of his that he had not lost, however; he had even acquired more of them, as she discovered one evening a few weeks after the Sunday noon when little Henry tore her dress.
Mr. Shelby had come home from his office in a state of irritability, which he made audible even before he entered the house; and from her windows upstairs she heard him denouncing his old negro driver. There had been a thunderstorm earlier in the afternoon, but that was no excuse— “not a dog-gone bit of excuse!” Mr. Shelby declared — for a carriage to be “all so sploshed-over with mud that a decent man’d be ashamed to get caught dead in it!” And he seemed to resent the fat old servitor’s wheezy explanation that the mud was the work of a malevolent motor-car. “Cain’t go nowhur them automob’les ain’ goin’ to git you these days! I had my carri’ge all spick-an’-span. Automob’le come zimmin’ by jes’ as we turn onto the avenoo. ‘Splickety-splick-splash!’ she say, an’ zoosh! jes’ look at my nice clean carri’ge solid mud! No, suh, Mist’ Shelby; I had my carri’ge all wash up fresh. Nasty ole automob’le spoil ev’ything! No, suh, I — —”
“Gee-mun-nent-ly!” Martha heard her father exclaim. “What you tryin’ to do? Talk me to death? I already heard enough talk in my office for one day, thank you! By Cripey, you stop that eternal gab o’ yours and get those horses into the barn and sponge their mouths out! Hear me?”
He came into the house and could be heard muttering snappishly to himself on the stairway, as he ascended to his room to “wash his face and hands for dinner.” But at the table he proved that soap and water were ineffective, at least to remove bitterness from a face; and he found fault with everything. The most unbearable of his troubles finally appeared to be put upon him by the salt, which the humidity of the weather had affected. “I s’pose this is the way you keep house in Italy!” he said. “Nothin’ but smell and deggeredation over there anyway — they prob’ly don’t care whether they can get salt out o’ their saltcellars or not. But in this country, in a decent man’s house, he’d like to see at least one saltcellar on his table that’d work!”
“It’s apt to be like that in hot weather after a rain,” Martha returned placidly. “What went wrong at the office this afternoon, papa?”
“Nothin’!” he said fiercely. “What’s my office got to do with wet salt? Why can’t you ever learn to keep some connection between your thoughts? Geemunently!”
“So you had a good day, did you, papa?”
“It would ‘a’ been,” he replied angrily, “if it hadn’t been for a fool friend o’ yours!”
“Somebody I’m responsible for?” she inquired with a genial sarcasm that exasperated him into attempted mockery — for when he was angriest with her he would repeat something she said, and, to point the burlesque, would speak in a tinny and whining falsetto which he seemed to believe was a crushing imitation of his daughter’s voice. “‘Somebody I’m responsible for?’” he squeaked, using this form of reprisal now. “No; it ain’t somebody you’re responsible for!” Here he fell back upon downright ferocity. “Doggone him! Somebody better be responsible for him!”
At this Martha made a good guess. “Dan Oliphant!”
“Yes, ma’am! And I came within just one o’ throwin’ him out o’ my office! Stood up there and grinned at me in front o’ my own desk and told me what I had to do! What I had to do!”
“And do you have to, papa?” she asked.
“What!”
“I only wondered — —”
“Why, plague take him, I never saw the beat of it!” he went on, disregarding her. “Walked right into my office and told me I had to run my car line all the way across his Addition. Told me I had to! I told him we were goin’ almost to the edge of it and that’d be every last speck o’ the way we’d move until he does the right thing.”
“Until he does what ‘right thing,’ papa?”
“Until he quits bein’ a hog!” the old man returned violently. “He seems to think the best men in this town got nothin’ on earth to do but spend their time buildin’ up his property for him and makin’ it more valuable, all for his benefit. I told him when he was ready to act like a decent man and reorganize his holdings with a good trust company’s advice, and issue stock, and let somebody else in, we might talk to him and not before.”
“What did Dan say?”
“Said he tried to get us in at the start, and now we could go plum to! Said I’d put that car line through there whether I wanted to or not. Threatened me with a petition of his lot owners, and said they were liable to go before the legislature and get my charter annulled, if I didn’t do it.”
“Was he angry, papa?”
“Angry? No!” Mr. Shelby vociferated. “What in continental did he have to be angry about? I was the one that was angry. He stood up there and laughed and bragged about what he was goin’ to do till you’d thought he’d bust with the gas of it! Why, Great Geemunently! — you’d thought this whole city’s got nothin’ to do but turn in and run around doin’ what Ornaby Addition says it’s got to! I says, ‘Yes!’ I says. ‘So from now on the tail’s goin’ to wag the dog, is it?’ ‘I don’t know but it might,’ he says. ‘This town’s done considerable laughin’ at me,’ he says. ‘I expect it’s about time I did some laughin’ myself,’ he says. ‘You’ll have to look out for your charter, Mr. Shelby,’ he says.”
Martha ventured to continue her naïveté, and unfortunate
ly carried it too far. “And will you have to look out for it, papa?” she asked gently.
With his thin but hard old fist he struck the table a blow that jarred the china and jingled the silver. “Haven’t you got any sense?” he shouted. “I’ll show him who he’s talkin’ to! There’s a few men left in this town that’ll teach him a little before he gets through with ’em! I’m not the only one he thinks he can lay down the law to.” He glared at her, his small gray face flushing with his increased anger. “Are you still standin’ up for him after the way he’s treated you?”
This took Martha’s breath, and for an instant she was at a loss. Never before had her father seemed to notice how she was “treated” — by anybody. “I don’t know what you — I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“Don’t you?” he returned sharply, and, before the bright stare of his angry eyes, her own troubled gaze fell. “You say you don’t know what I mean?”
“Why — no. Not — not at all,” she murmured.
“Well, I do!” And with a brief shot of breath between his almost closed lips, he further expressed an emotion that remained enigmatic to her. He rose. “Seems to me it’s about time you quit standin’ up for him,” he said; and stalked out of the room, leaving her still at the table.
She sat there in an attitude of some rigidity after she had heard him go upstairs, and she continued to sit there, though she had finished her dinner before he departed. The conclusion she reached in her thoughts was that there was a question she would never ask him; — she would never ask him what he had meant by that final remark of his. She hoped he meant only that her pride ought to resent a neighbour’s failure to come to say he was glad to see her at home again — but she feared her father meant more than this. She feared he meant much more, and she so feared it that she would never dare to ask him.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 353